Former chocolate magnate Felix Rosenzweig propels Jürgen into the chocolate industry in the late 1950s. Felix Rosenzweig is one of the pre-war owners of Rajsigl and Hofbauer and he flees Austria in 1939, only to return in 1950 with nothing but the shirt on his back, yet nevertheless alive and with some of his connections and company shares awaiting him, confiscated, in the vaults of Swiss banks. Felix Rosenzweig brings his wife Isabella Fischer with him to Salzburg, and she opens a small photography studio with a darkroom on the ground floor of a building that had originally been owned by the Rosenzweigs, but was confiscated in 1940, and, with the approval of the regime, some suitable people had moved in during the war. These same people generously rent Felix Rosenzweig his own premises in 1950, so that he can set up the photography “salon” for his wife Isabella Fischer, and for the whole time the civil court suits are going on, dealing with the (partial) return of Felix Rosenzweig’s property to Felix Rosenzweig, these people collect rent for Isabella’s photography salon. The reinstatement of the Rosenzweig family property to its members takes an unreasonably long time, partly because the other members of the Rosenzweig family who are holders of this property never show up, because, it seems, they are no longer around, and at that point, in 1950, it is difficult to prove where and how they met their end, because then (and even later, and even, to some degree, today) the Austrians stubbornly insist that they were the first victims of Nazism and that they haven’t a clue about anything, all they know about is their own losses, their own victims, their own vast suffering. My parents Martha and Jürgen Traube offer Felix Rosenzweig and Isabella Fischer (Rosenzweig by marriage) a small flat in the attic of the building where we live, until they find their feet, and are surprised and almost offended that Felix and Isabella bring up their Jewish background. Nonsense, Jürgen Traube says, Jews are people, too.
I develop my first photographs as an elementary school student in the back room, in the makeshift darkroom of the Isabella Photo Studio, following the instructions and advice of its proprietress, Isabella, who tells me war stories, always in a whisper. While my parents seem to know nothing of the war, for Isabella the war never seems to have ended. Felix Rosenzweig dies in 1978, and Isabella leaves Austria and moves to Yugoslavia, to the little port of Rijeka. Why, for what reason, she never says, though I visit her at least once a year until 2000, when I learn that she has hanged herself in the attic of a building near the train station. My father Jürgen Traube, as set out in Felix Rosenzweig’s will, was “to send a quantity of chocolate truffles to Isabella on a regular basis, no matter where she was living, and if he, Jürgen Traube, should die before Isabella, then his son, Hans Traube, will assume responsibility for supplying the truffles”. So after my father dies in 1980 I send Isabella Fischer chocolates in numerous shapes and sizes made by the most famous chocolatiers. I send her confections from Manner, Lindt, Droste, Suchard, Nestlé, Milka, Neuhaus, Cardullos, La Patisserie, Asbach/Reber, Biffar (the only selection of candied fruit — the rest were all chocolates), Hacher, Underberg. I discover there are truffle balls called Joy of Life and Karl Marx Kugeln, so I send Isabella those, too. The most expensive chocolate truffles are, of course, the Austrian ones from Salzburg. By sending them I hope to delight Isabella. They are Strauss balls, actually praline cubes, and Constance und Amadeus balls by Reber, also previously co-owned by Felix Rosenzweig. I mention Isabella Fischer, because she is a source of key information about my possible origins.
“Lebensborn” means fount of life. As a registered society (Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein) Lebensborn grew into a secret Third Reich project for preserving the racial purity of the German nation. It was S.S.-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler who designed the project and brought it to life. A shy and sensitive, restrained and modest man, not tall, he rather resembled a subservient, pedantic bank clerk than the head of the state police. Himmler suffered from migraines and stomach cramps, and nearly fainted when they killed some one hundred Jews in his honour at the Russian front. That was when he called for the use of “more humane methods” of execution, which meant introducing gas into special chambers fitted with showers.
For many, Lebensborn ended in a nightmare; some came out of Lebensborn decapitated, cloned. Founded in 1935, the Lebensborn Project was designed at first to care for “racially and biologically quintessential” pregnant women, who would give birth to racially and biologically quintessential sons of the homeland, perfect stallions at least one metre eighty centimetres tall, blonde and blue-eyed, muscles bulging, and sleek, disciplined Spartans.
There are absolute and unquestionable principles which every S.S. man must uphold, shrieks Himmler before his companions in Poznan in 1943. One basic principle must be an absolute rule for S.S. men: we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, this is of no interest to me. Remember, we will be unfeeling and rough only as much as this is necessary. We Germans are the only people in the world who treat animals decently, and we will treat this human animal kind courteously and humanely.
Himmler opens the first Lebensborn home in Steinhöring near Munich in August 1936. At Steinhöring certified Aryan women can give birth to their illegal children in secrecy, most of them hand their children over to the S.S. officials after shedding a few tears, or simply abandon them. The children who are ill, who are mental or physical invalids, are sent off to the paediatric ward of the Leander Institut at Brandenburg-Gorden near Berlin, where under the guidance of Dr Hans Heinz, “expert in child euthanasia”, they are first killed, and then their brains are examined.
I was born at Steinhöring, Olaf told me. I met Olaf at one of the meetings to which people go looking for their lives. First they seek themselves, then they seek forgiveness for the sins of their fathers. Confused and angry people attend these meetings. The descendants of well-known and not so well-known Nazis attend, as do the descendants of those who disappeared in concentration camps. At these meetings the Nazi descendants vomit up hatred and impotence; they excavate long years of silence, feelings of guilt and a plea for forgiveness which ends in unthinkable embraces and timid friendships. At these meetings people try to heal wounds that, like cancer, invisibly take over the body and eat it from inside. These meetings are interesting meetings. Those who do not go to such meetings write books.
I was born at Steinhöring in 1942, said Olaf, who is taller than I am, and I am quite tall, 190 centimetres. I was very good looking, he said.
I was good looking, too, I said. When we stand next to each other, it’s as if we’ve stepped down off a macho billboard, as if we were Hollywood actors, although both of us are greying.